1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to the field of aircraft display units that provide flight information to the pilot or flight crew of an aircraft.
2. Description of the Related Art
The increased use of electronic flight displays and integrated modular avionics have allowed designers to integrate systems to a much higher degree than was practical with previous flight deck components. Although the integration may have made it easier to operate an aircraft, it has increased the complexity in detecting avionics failure conditions.
One possible failure condition is associated with the display of misleading or erroneous attitude information on a primary display unit. In order to prevent the display of misleading or erroneous attitude information, redundancies may be incorporated into the aircraft. For instance, attitude information provided by a plurality of systems may be compared with each other for inconsistencies. If inconsistencies are detected, then a failure condition may be triggered by informing the pilot and/or preventing the display of inconsistent attitude information.
Those skilled in the art know that attitude information (or orientation information) may be provided to a synthetic vision system for the generation of a pixel data set corresponding to the scene outside the aircraft, where such pixel data set provides scene-related data but not attitude data. After being generated, the pixel data set may be used to display the scene outside the aircraft on a pixel-by-pixel basis. If the pixel data set is not used as an attitude data source for the comparison of attitude information with another source and/or for the detection of inconsistent attitude information, then an opportunity for preventing the display of misleading or erroneous attitude information could be lost.